
(Nov 13, 2006)
Pretty dismal but not completely hopeless. Let's face it, if you're a hardened Old School monster movie fan, you've suffered through many tedious hours of talking heads and stock footage just to see a few minutes of a guy in make-up run around grabbing up women, or an iguana with a rubber fin glued to its back wrestle a baby alligator. GIGANTIS, on the other hand, does deliver the good with two incredibly huge creatures fighting to the death and destroying a city while doing it. Of course, the movie itself is a botched five-car pileup but you can't have everything.
This flick started life as Toho's sequel to the very successful GOJIRA (known here as GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS). Its Japanese title GOJIRA NO GYAKUSHYU translates to
GODZILLA II: THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL! GODZILLA'S COUNTER-ATTACK or GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN, both of which make the monster sound like a commando. Problems with rights to the name led to this picture being released as GIGANTIS, THE FIRE MONSTER (which is how I saw it as a precocious rugrat way back when) and it was jacked around in a way that suggested the editors hated the whole job and wanted to get fired. (The original film is now available and I really ought to check it out.)
Aside from the unending moronic narration, cutting back of character development, substitution of old music from KRONOS for the original score and probably making the theatres sell stale popcorn just to ruin the experience completely, the American studio couldn't add anything as bizarre as the scene where a white-bearded and wig-wearing expert informs Japan's police and scientific leaders what has surfaced. His dialogue is astoundingly bad, so atrocious that I defy any kaiju buff to sit through them with a straight face.
"Horrors in the world of science are part of nature's plan," he begins. (What the...?). The pair of battling monsters are identified, using one of those illustrated Golden Books for children (yes, seriously). The expert says dinosaurs were "murderers, original plundering murderers who killed everything in their way... These boys are both Gigantis and Angurus."
Shown newsreel footage of the original Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo a few years earlier, one guy in uniform asks, "Didn't you finally manage to destroy him?" No, genius, you think you might have noticed him if he were still crashing around Japan.
On the plus side, the movie has Gigantis and Angurus really go at it. The fights scenes between kaiju like these are usually slowed down to make the creatures seemed believably ponderous. (After all, you don't expect to see an elephant scurry by as fast a chipmunk.) This time, though, the battling is shown at normal speed. Sometimes it really drives home the sad truth that we're watching two exhausted, sweaty Japanese men in heavy rubber suits climbing on each other. But it also makes it seem that the monsters seriously hate each other and can't wait to go at it. They also tangle a lot more like animals than like WWF stars; there's a lot of scratching and kicking and biting. In fact, Gigantis kills Angurus with a serious chomp to the base of the neck that draws gallons of blood. This is actually kind of shocking, since we're used to seeing Godzilla using shoulder throws and haymakers on his opponents after the next picture.
I like Gigantis' different look, too. He has a longer neck and slimmer body than the classic Godzilla, and some wicked fangs that curve out.
Like the Universal horror films of the 1940s, there's a more-or-less continuity between Godzilla movies (although details sometimes don't quite come out right). It's clear that the gigantic beast that levelled Tokyo and was killed by the Oxygen Destroyer in GOJIRA did in fact die. This is a different specimen of the same species, and you do have to wonder why Gigantis (or Gojira II) also has radioactive steam breath. There must be a backstory there. Evidently a number of prehistoric animals were mutated and released from their sleep by atomic testing at the same time. Imagine a possible scene where a satellite photo shows a remote colony of Godzillas breeding and raising young...!
As it is, the final scene has Gigantis being buried under what looks exactly like a cascade of ice cubes, blasted loose by fighter jets. Years later in KING KONG VS GODZILLA, the island where the beast was frozen must have broken loose and drifted into warmer waters. Here, when he struggled out of the ice, he began in earnest his long career of trampling cities, tangling with other giant monsters and generally being obnoxious. It was this scene that Blue Oyster Cult had in mind.